Throwback Thursday – Terry Allen – Human Remains
Posted on | August 26, 2009 | No Comments
1. Terry Allen is West Texas. For those who haven’t spent much time out there, nothing is very surprising once you pass Eastland on I-20. Upended Cadillacs pressed into the caprock? Sure. Runaway longhorns on the access road? Absolutely. Inexplicable light formations? In several places. That’s why Terry Allen’s music continues to bring the unexpected, and 1996’s Human Remains is no different.
2. Allen opens up with the defining line “Hey I don’t need no chickenshit business man/ tellin’ me what to do” in “Gone To Texas”, with a backing choir featuring the Talking Heads’ David Byrne and roots mainstay Lucinda Williams. Lu also accompanies on the shuffling “Room to Room”, in which a man faces his inability to blame his wife for her carousing. Allen isn’t afraid to express how the world looks through his ever-present glasses, trying to understand the perspective of a hostile 13-year-old on “Crisis Site 13″, spitting “I’m 13 and I’m in love and I hope you die.” “After the Fall” takes a sarcastic look at what people have done in the name of being “cool”, as Allen subtly questions what is cool? Being an against the grain sculptor/Flatlander mentor/playwright/honky tonker? Absolutely.
3. If the album has a thesis statement, it comes on the closer “Flatland Boogie”, which finds Allen and his “baby” flying across the Panhandle in his old Ford, fast enough that “some old angel from Amarillo must be helpin us to hold it on the road”. He laments the passing of time, with a crack at the current radio offerings, while noticing that nothing ever really changes between Texas and Mexico. But when he says “Headlights a’ shinin’/ On all we ever need to know”, he manages to discount his sarcastic worldview and simplify things, which in west Texas, is a way of life.
Guy Clark – “The Guitar”
Posted on | August 26, 2009 | No Comments
1. I hear Guy Clark writes songs slowly, often on a piece of graph paper, filling each square one letter a time. I don’t know how long it took this song to get out of him, but it explains why he does what he does – he can’t help writing the songs, they pick him. Whether he is explaining that now at the age of 67 or as a young gun in Nashville’s wild 70’s songwriters crowd. It also explains his new album title without saying it outright (a Clark specialty).
2. Premise of the story is this: Guy walks into a guitar store and basically reenacts “The Devil Went Down to Georgia”, only he is competing against himself and ends up winning his own guitar. It’s not as complicated as it sounds, and is broken up with some nice instrumental runs. The song is a straightforward Guy Clark song, with an interesting enough story, but doesn’t really show the power of what he can do, like “Dublin Blues” or “Homegrown Tomatoes”. Even still, Guy Clark can write a simple story song “in his old country way of strumming” that has more depth than a lot of other writers’ best work.
3. Clark sums up the reason I like him early in the song as the power within him takes over, absolutely sneering “It was like I always knew it/ I don’t know where I learned it/ it wasn’t nothin’ but the truth/ so I just reared back and burned it”. Such an innate ability to express unflinching truth is what endears him to his fans, and he is quick to point out that he is just doing what he knows how to do. Here’s to hoping Clark keeps going with what he knows, especially on the upcoming Some Days the Song Writes You.
Album Review: Levon Helm – Electric Dirt
Posted on | August 25, 2009 | No Comments
1. I don’t know why I hesitated on this album for such a long time. Perhaps it was because Helm’s last outing Dirt Farmer, despite the energy (and inclusion of Steve Earle and Buddy Miller songs), left me indifferent. I was wrong, and I admit it. I won’t venture to say that I love every song on this record, but it is one of the rare ones where the whole record is greater than the sum of its parts. With one listen, Electric Dirt vaulted from an optional listen to a strong year-end top 10 contender.
2. Helm wasn’t the most expressive voice in the Band, but he was certainly the voice of the Band. Amazingly, his battle with throat cancer has only given that voice a dry edge that blends perfectly with his backing vocals (often including his daughter Amy). Though it isn’t enough to carry the too-slow “Move Along Trains”, it is the driving force behind the album’s standout track “Growing Trade”. Penned by Helm and Americana not-so-secret weapon Larry Campbell, “Trade” focuses on a farmer who has been forced to leave his fading legitimate business for a far more profitable marijuana crop. Helm’s drawl manages to carry all the regret and fear of a family farmer doing what he has to do to get by, with Campbell’s moaning fiddle ably filling the gaps.
3. A veteran of Helm’s Midnight Rambles, it would be a glaring omission to not take a moment to highlight the contributions of Larry Campbell. His fiddle opened another of the top Americana records of the year, Buddy and Julie Miller’s Written in Chalk, and he plays several instruments excellently on this record. The pastoral, vaguely Celtic “Golden Bird” builds each stanza to a majestic peak, barely needing percussion to propel it skyward thanks to Campbell’s twin fiddle anchor. The occasional Dylan sideman is going to have a tough time topping his contributions to the Americana scene in 2009.
4. Perhaps because of his cancer bout, or seeing the untimely end of his former bandmates Rick Danko and Richard Manuel, Helm faces death with uncanny optimism. On “When I Go Away”, one of the more upbeat songs about leaving this world, he proclaims that the “sun’s gonna shine through the shadows” at his funeral, and longs to see his parents on “White Dove”. Reminiscent of Appalachian anthems like “I’ll Fly Away”, Helm’s sentiment shows a gratefulness for life that balances out the still-exuberant songs that fill the rest of the record.
5. Most of all, this record reminds me that Helm was the only American in the Band, where he lent authenticity to their Southern-leaning songs like “King Harvest (Has Surely Come)” and “The Night They Drove Old Dixie Down”. On Electric Dirt, he mines the territory of his youth to present the America he knows: from the rollicking, New Orleans take on the Dead’s “Tennessee Jed” to the cover of Randy Newman’s “King Fish”, from Newman’s own Southern opus Good Old Boys. This record owes its success to Helm’s dedication to sticking to what he knows, rather than succumbing to late-career cash grabs a la Carlos Santana, and makes it look easy.
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